Cumberbabes: Listen to Benedict Cumberbatch talk in a brainy way about nuclear physics, in the play Copenhagen, on BBC Radio

Benedict Cumberbatch and Lara Pulver at the BAFTA Los Angeles 2013 Awards Season Tea Party, at the Four Seasons Hotel on Jan. 12, 2013 in Los Angeles, California. Lara Pulver appeared in an episode of the the Sherlock TV series called a Scandal in Belgravia. (Photo by David Livingston/Getty Images)

BBC Radio recently broadcast the play Copenhagen by Michael Frayn. The play is based on a real life meeting between German physicist Werner Heisenberg (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) and his friend and mentor, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr (played by Simon Russell Beale). The meeting took place in September, 1941, at Bohr’s Copenhagen home. Bohr’s wife Margrethe (Greta Scacchi) was there as well.

Benedict Cumberbatch’s fans love his voice, they often swear that they’d be happy to listen to him read a telephone book. Well, Copenhagen is for them because it’s two hours long and there’s lots and lots of talking. I remember somebody, somewhere, expressing a desire to have him read the periodic table of the elements, which is quite apt, given the scientific nature of much of Copenhagen. Cumberbatch is a talented mimic, (you should hear him imitate Alan Rickman!) but he doesn’t try to put on a German accent or anything.

Fans might get a laugh out of a line spoken by Margrethe Bohr: “There was something alien about him, even then.”

At the time of this Bohr-Heisenberg meeting, Denmark was under Nazi occupation. Heisenberg had travelled to Copenhagen from Berlin to give a lecture, ostensibly anyway, and he made time to visit his old friend.

It’s known that Heisenberg was working on Germany’s attempt to build an atomic bomb. Michael Frayn speculates on what he intended to say to Heisenberg and what he did say. (Even now, no one knows for certain.)

Bohr later escaped from Denmark, and went to the U.S. to work on the Manhattan Project – the successful (though not without controversy) international attempt to build an atomic bomb.

Presumably, they did discuss nuclear weaponry, but did Heisenberg try to recruit Bohr, was he warning him about what Germany was up to, or did he propose some kind of secret international agreement to just pretend to be working on a bomb? Did he talk in such a roundabout way that his intention was misunderstood?

Copenhagen is directed by Emma Harding. On a BBC Radio blog she’s quoted as saying: “The notion of uncertainty runs through the whole drama – the uncertainty and the unsaid within human relationships, the uncertainty and the contradiction of human memory, and the uncertainty – the unknowability –of human motivation. And, in the foreground, is the still unresolved mystery of why Heisenberg went to see Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941.” “. . .the play itself isn’t about science. Or rather, it is about science, but it’s about science in the context of morality, politics and history. These two physicists are working on opposing sides in a global war and they are both very aware of the potential chain reaction – that their work on the atom could inevitably contribute to the deaths of millions of people.”

Copenhagen starts with the Bohrs, in the Great Beyond, having a chat about that long-ago day. “Why did he come?”
We know that they are indeed dead because we hear a creepy wind blowing and Bohr actually says “now we’re all three of us dead and gone.”

Cumberbatch, as Heisenberg, says that he is only remembered for two things now, his uncertainty principle and his visit to Bohr.

I must say that this business of ghosts, rehashing what’s obviously a very familiar topic for them, seemed hopelessly contrived at first. But I did get used to it. Really!

Be warned though, the meeting is examined, and re-examined, several times. More than once, I thought that things were about to wrap up, but no! Of course, many films are like that, too.

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